All posts by Steve Stern

Mixed feeling on the Roma Blond Angel

Current Affairs, Psychological Musings

greek-roma-coupleIn case you missed it, a couple of days ago the police in Greece, while raiding a Roma neighborhood of  Farsala, found a blond girl they say didn’t fit. On one hand, it seems the police just swept up Maria because she didn’t look like her parents, on the other hand, the state asserts that Maria’s parents claim they have 14 children, six who are less than ten months apart which would make them suspicious. Of something, somehow. When I first saw the story, my immediate reaction was that it was just another case of prejudice against the Roma.  Historically, next to Jews, the Roma are Europe’s favorite scapegoats. They are the classic outsiders, after all.

From the newspaper reports, it seems the police were in the area looking for drugs and weapons when they spotted the girl who looked different, and confiscated her. I have a problem with the police going to minority communities looking for drugs anyway, and an even bigger problem with the authorities confiscating kids without real cause. Sure, they will probably find drugs in the community just like they would probably find them with a random drug bust anywhere.

As I type that, a little inside voice is screaming Yea, but there is a better chance of finding drugs in a Roma neighborhood. Then I remembered a story an acquaintance told me. She loves plants and lives in Atherton so she thought she would try growing pot. She figured she would be able to get a better grade for less money, less risk, and more fun. It turned out that it wasn’t as easy as she thought. Cannabis is a dioecious plant, meaning that male and female flowers are on different plants and the idea is to keep the males away from the females so then females continue to grow flowers rather than seeds. In Atherton, so many people are growing pot that the male pollen is everywhere and it was very difficult to keep the females isolated. According to Forbes, Atherton is the most expensive place to live in the United States and you can be sure that nobody is making random drug searches there.

Meanwhile, back in Greece, they had no real cause, they just took Maria away from her parents and decided to find a cause later. In a turn around, they say they have a kidnapped child but nobody from whom she kidnapped but they still charged the parents with abduction. Now. the parents, it seems, will have to prove that she wasn’t kidnapped. She doesn’t look like her parents but they don’t claim that they are the biological parents, they claim that a woman from Bulgaria asked them to take Maria because that mother couldn’t take care of her. Now they are trying to prove that they didn’t commit a crime that may not have even been committed (on the bright side, a Roma kid who was taken from her parents, has been reunited after DNA tests showed they were related).

Here is the thing, though, when I read that Maria’ parents are illiterate, and had registered their family in several towns, collecting about $3,420 a month in child welfare subsidies; when I read that they have 14 children, six who are less than ten months apart: I started to think, Well, yeah, they are gypsies after all, and gypsies are known for abducting children and trafficking in them. I started to buy into the whole gypsy abductor scenario. It scares me how easily I can slip into the same stereotyping that I blame the police for.

And it scares me almost as much how easily I can stereotype the police for doing the wrong thing.

 

Kicking the can

Americana, Politics, Psychological Musings


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The government is back up and running – using the running, very loosely – and nothing seems to have changed. In some ways, it seems like Congress has just kicked the can down the road. Maybe the road will look different next January when it will be closer to elections, maybe it will look different because the assessment of the players – on both sides – will be different going in, and maybe it won’t.

I started to write about an incident with a woman in a supermarket to make my point and then remembered that I told the same story in 2011 – it obviously made a big impression on me – so here it is Something like twenty-five years ago – I remember it like it was only five years ago – I was waiting in the ten items or less line, when I realized the person two or three people in front of me had an over-full cart being pushed by a crazy looking teenager. Just then, her mother came running over very embarrassed saying something like Oh! no, dear; it is not nice to put a full cart in this line. The crazy teenager just looked at us like somebody yelling in the street and said “They don’t care”. She probably wasn’t drooling but I do remember her looking slightly dangerous in a ready to go berserk way.  We all looked at our feet, including the checker, and she went ahead.1

It was a vivid demonstration of  how much power the craziest person in the room has and it has, obviously, stuck with me. I am going to define crazy person – here – as someone being willing to let the government collapse if they don’t get their way. Leading up to the shutdown, the right fringe of the Republican Party – who I am calling  the Tea Party, for brevity – gave every indication that they would be the only crazy person in the room. They constantly made statements indicating that they were willing to take the country down to get their way (and that the government was so bad, or so big, or so ineffectual, or so something, that taking it down wouldn’t matter or might, even, be good). The Tea Party power, however, rested on the belief that they were the only people crazy enough to actually take this government down.

Obama has a long history – as long as you can have in four and a half years of  being president – of compromising (sometimes it even seemed as if he was compromising before the settlement talks started).  This time however, Obama said he would not compromise, We’re not going to pay a ransom for America to pay its bills ….we can’t make extortion routine as part of our democracy. Like the Tea Party, his beliefs were strong enough, he was crazy enough, to let the government shutdown. Additionally, he seemed willing to not compromise to raise the debt ceiling, no matter how much damage it would do.

Obama bet that he could justify his motives for his crazy behavior better than the Tea Party could and the polls proved him right. He bet that, what Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker calls the Republican “survival caucus”, would vote for a compromise if there were two crazy people in the room. He was right. In the end,  just eighty-seven out of two hundred and thirty-two Republicans in the House of Representatives, changed their collective minds, but that was enough, along with the Democratic members who compromised on the timeline.

I am not sure that the Democrats had much of a choice in this except to compromise on the timeline. They had to compromise on something to make a deal and, with Obama refusing to give on Obamacare, all that was left was the time line (the did agree to means test reimbursable payments for low-income people buying insurance but that was, apparently, already in the bill). In the end, everybody agreed to kick the can down the road.

1. https://srstern.com/2011/in-defense-of-obama-or-the-advantage-of-being-crazy/

 

From way too fast on the road to beauty in cyberspace

Art, Cars, Web/Tech

Stirling-Moss-and-Denis-Jenkinson-Mercedes-Benz-300-SLR-in-1955-Mille-Miglia-front-three-quarter-2 If you grew up in California in the 50s and were obsessed with cars, at some point you raced on the street. In my case, it was right after I got my license and I got caught about three weeks later and lost my license for the next 60 days. Our idea of racing on public roads was pretty much limited to drag racing, And, for the most part, only the first five hundred feet from a stop light.  But in Europe, they were hardcore; they had real, official, racing on the street.

OK, they called it roadracing, but it was the same thing. I am not sure when they started roadracing – probably less than one week after the car was invented – but it pretty much ended by the end of 1950s. By then, racing on public roads had become truly insane with the all-out-racecars hitting speeds more commonly associated with airplanes. Probably the craziest of all these races was the Mille Miglia – meaning a thousand miles and pronounced mille mille as a sort of pun – that started at Brescia near the Alps, ran south to Rome, and then north back to Brescia. All of this on second rate Italian roads with an estimated 5,000,000 Italians watching. Usually watching from very close.

The record for the Mille Milga was set by Sterling Moss in a Mercedes Benz at an average speed of 97.96 miles per hour (on narrow, rough, windy, Italian roads). The car was called a 300SLR and was supposed to resemble the standard Mercedes Benz 300SL sports car, however, in reality, the car was a full blown, hand built, race car. Several years ago, Mercedes built 75 updated versions of this car – only about ten originals were built – to sell to very rich people at about a million dollars each (very rich people who, apparently, don’t need a windshield). OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA But the point of all this is that Jimmy at Peak-Design – I think, it is Peak-Design, I know it is via Deviant Art – thought Wow it would be awesome with a normal hardtop and some black rims. He then resigned it on his computer. I’m impressed and would buy it in a minute, if it were real and I had several hundred million dollars. Mercedes_Benz_Stirling_Moss_by_Peak_Design Stirlingmoss_Wallpaper_by_Peak_Design

Rush & Gravity

Film

Rush5 Michele and I saw Rush a couple of weeks ago and it was very good. I wish it were a transcendental movie that I could fall all over myself recommending, but it wasn’t and I can’t. Ron Howard doesn’t make transcendent movies, but he does make consistently good to very good movies.

For me, it had the added benefit of being about Formula One and an  era of Formula One that I really don’t know much about.

When I was somewhere around eight to eleven, I had gone to a couple of races with my dad , but – in those days – the races were hard to see because they were held on city streets and we stood behind temporary fences and, often, trees. I remember a race in Golden Gate Park and one on the 17 Mile Drive at Pebble Beach and in both of them I could only see a short section of road and had almost no idea of what was going on. But the seed had been planted.

By the time I was a teenager, I had become car crazy and then sportscar crazy. That led to roadracing and the ultimate roadracing was Formula One. Not that we had much exposure to F1, as it is usually called now, but we could read about it – once a month about two months after the event – in Road and Track magazine. I followed it as close as a sixteen year old could follow anything in print and even had a picture of my hero, Sterling Moss, on by bedroom wall (much to the concern of my mother who didn’t understand and would have prefered I had a picture of somebody like Liz Taylor).

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MossLotusClimax19610806 When I was twenty, I saw my first Formula One race at Riverside  Raceway, but by my 30s I had drifted away from the fold and missed the era of Rush.  When I met Michele, I didn’t watch much TV and have no idea if F1 was on TV or not but, by the time we got a DVR, I could timeshift and watch F1 races live on Sunday morning. I fell in love with F1 all over again having missed the 70s and 80s.

Rush is a story of two men during that period, specifically the 1976 fight for the championship. The two guys are wildly different – probably more so than in real life – and, I am pretty sure, it is a movie anybody would enjoy.

Gravity, on the other hand, is brilliant. Don’t take my word for it, everybody thinks it is brilliant, Stephanie Zacharek at The Village Voice pretty much sums it up: Gravity is harrowing and comforting, intimate and glorious, the kind of movie that makes you feel more connected to the world rather than less. Peter Travers at Rolling Stone is even more effusive: The Mexican-born [ director ]Cuarón is a true visionary….he turns Gravity into a thing of transcendent beauty and terror. It’s more than a movie. It’s some kind of miracle.

If you you are going to see one movie this year, go to Gravity, if you are going to see more than one, you won’t go wrong with Rush.

GRAVITY

Shutdown, honor, and doing what ever we want

Americana, Psychological Musings, Uncategorized

Government Shutdown

My complaint with organized religion – my fear of, really – is not in any particular belief structure. I listen to Pope Francis say If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge? – and I think , Now there is a holy man, there is a man connected to something greater than himself. My grievance, my fear of, is with that faction – that all religions seem to have – that justifies what they want by the certainty of using God. Hey! don’t blame me about my belief that homosexuality is bad, God told me to believe that way.

When I listen to the doctrinaire faction of the Republican Party, the No Compromise faction, what scares me is that they have that certainty. They seem to believe what they are saying. While what they are saying – and doing – seems cynical and hypocritical to me, I am fearful that they are doing it out of the religion of greater National Need. I am alarmed that this government shutdown isn’t a beef between the Republicans and Democrats. I am alarmed that the Republicans are shutting down the government just to shut the government down. What distresses me is that the shutdown is the goal.

Sure, not all the Republicans feel this way, maybe not even a majority feel this way, but a hardline core does and they are wagging the dog right now. That minority is looking at themselves as being honorable (much more honorable than that Kenyan President). They are what Eric Hoffer called True Believers.

To – not quite – pick an example at random, going to Michelle Bachmann’s website gives the impression that she is very happy with the government shutdown. She is so certain in her beliefs that she doesn’t even see the irony in voting – and campaigning  – to shut down the Government and then working to get the WWII Memorial open, saying, on her website, Another wonderful day of greeting brave WWII veterans from across the country at their memorial. Of course part of it is that Bachmann only wants to shutdown the bits she doesn’t like, but it alarms me that she believes the parts she likes are the only legitimate parts.

While I don’t understand John Boehner’s strategy – he talks like he knows the shutdown is doing damage and then continues to keep the government from functioning – or his justification, I am sure he has one. Maybe he thinks that he is the only rational player on the right and he justifies his actions as the only way to keep the barbarians from taking over.

Everybody has a justification – a reason if you prefer – for what they do. Just saying I am doing it because I want to is not enough. Especially when what we want to do is horrible or illegal. Then the reason is often about a truth that is bigger than the immediate issue. Often that bigger truth it is a truth that other observers can’t see.